Health IT for large networks, hospitals, and traditional physician practices varies a lot, but there is consistent challenge that runs through all of them – applications.
IT administrators struggle to balance the demands for applications that rang from old versions of Internet Explorer and Java to the most modern cloud environments. It isn’t uncommon for large healthcare IT environments to have hundreds of applications dedicated to improving patient care. Many applications are now tied to mission critical medical equipment and there is no expectation that the vendor will regularly update the software tied to them.
Then consider this recent prediction from industry analyst firm IDC – in five years 80% of all healthcare data will pass through the cloud. It is a tsunami of information moving to a digital healthcare environment that brings new challenges.
Healthcare IT organizations must support these applications, but there are serious concerns about future supportability and security. The security risk cannot be understated as cyber attacks command this summer’s headlines, such as Washington Business Journal’s “4 things to know about data security after the Children’s hack.” Add to this daunting healthcare IT landscape new innovative applications enabling patients to interact with providers outside of the office.
These typically require the patient to install software and can create a great deal of network traffic between the patient and healthcare application server. As the volume of healthcare data grows, performance issue concerns rise in parallel. Add all of this to the inherent challenges of the healthcare environment such as zero-downtime and an end-user community whose life can depend on the information accessibility. You can see why healthcare is one of the most daunting IT environments.
Once we understand that as the environment for digital health, we need to develop a strategy to mitigate the risk and harness the opportunity. One of my top recommendations for healthcare organization is embracing VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure). There are a number of benefits to leveraging VDI in the healthcare space. I have written previous articles on how VDI can be a critical part of the security strategy and the benefits of using thin clients.
If you missed it, below are my top three reasons I recommend healthcare organization rapidly move to a VDI environment.
- Security: VDI means that the personal health information is never actually stored on the device used to access it. All the information stays in the data center, where it is easier to protect. In a mobile environment, it is much easier to decommission devices to limit access to critical information.
- Mobility: BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) goes hand-in-hand with security concerns. As healthcare innovation allows for greater capabilities in remote patient monitoring, the way information is accessed changes. Even in a more traditional hospital setting, communication devices often move room to room with the provider. These professionals need to be able to access information from anywhere and on any device.
- Reduced Costs: With a VDI environment, hospitals create a single “gold image” of their desktops, create pools of virtual desktops, and then access them via thin clients that cost much less than a desktop and last twice as long. Instead of managing a thousand different desktops, the IT department only needs to manage one desktop image and replicate it as many times as needed. In addition IT departments can roll out new applications and apply fixes, patches, and upgrades to every user at once.
With that as a background and recap on the healthcare IT environment, I’m going to review one of our partner’s solutions – VMware’s “AlwaysOn Point of Care” in part two of this healthcare blog series. ▪